Disguise powers MDLBEAST Soundstorm 2025 visual experience 

Visual Noise, Disguise and PRG have successfully completed their work on MDLBEAST Soundstorm 2025, combining creative, technical and production expertise to deliver a next-level fan experience at the festival. Creative production studio Visual Noise produced visuals and oversaw cameras across seven of the festival’s stages along with hundreds of informational screens throughout the site. The flagship Big Beast stage, delivered by PRG, was redesigned to showcase ultra-low-latency visuals on a vast LED canvas capable of ingesting 10 UHD 4K feeds. Disguise powered every stage and screen, with the festival being the first in the region to deploy the new GX 3+ server.

Now in its sixth year and bigger than ever before, 2025’s Soundstorm festival welcomed hundreds of thousands of fans over three days. Attendees enjoyed performances from an impressive lineup of 250 artists, including Cardi B, Post Malone, Halsey, Calvin Harris, and more. After a record-breaking event last year, the festival grounds and stages were reimagined as musical districts designed for fans to explore like a city. 

Visual Noise handled all the screens across the entire festival, managing a web of interconnected content ranging from performance visuals across all stages, to house looks, wayfinding and scheduling information. “Our overall creative brief was focused on the ability to display anything anywhere, and at a moment's notice,” says Trevor Burk, Principle Designer at Visual Noise. “Luckily with Disguise, we knew we had a solution that we could rely on to do just that, from the Big Beast stage to the smallest screen at the festival.” 

As part of this ambitious site-wide infrastructure, the new ‘Downtown’ district of the festival acted as a gathering place for crowds, offering a multi-storey experiential site filled with immersive screens and stages. The result was a more connected festival with visuals that could be updated in real-time on a huge scale to both entertain and educate fans, elevating their overall experience by ensuring they never missed a moment. MediaPro managed the playback system across the festival along with the Park Stage, Tunnel Stage and 6AG Stage, with CT handling sitewide LED and processing, and NEP managing the festival camera system. 

Soundstorm’s Big Beast main stage also saw an impressive overhaul this year. “Having worked with Visual Noise on the festival since 2021, we knew attendees would expect a visual spectacle on the Big Beast stage,”  says Yvonne Donnelly Smith, Director of Concert Touring and Live Music Events at PRG. “In the past, we were limited to doing Notch effects on camera on a 16:9 canvas. This year, we took things one step further. We wanted to offer artists the flexibility to use different layouts on the stage’s LED canvas, which was made up of a mixture of 4mm, 5mm, and 8mm pixel pitch panels. With the GX 3 and GX 3+, we were confident we had the processing power to do that without hitting latency issues.” 

This additional flexibility and the ability to display richer, more complex visuals meant that Soundstorm goers could enjoy a broader, more diverse range of content than ever before, setting a new benchmark for engaging multi-day live events. PRG also streamlined production, saving hours of time by creating a Notch content library and guiding artists through a previsualisation workflow on the GX 3+ ahead of the live show, ensuring that all visuals were precisely mapped and the live performances were executed flawlessly. 

“Having powered Soundstorm’s record-breaking Big Beast stage last year, we were proud to return and collaborate with Visual Noise, PRG, MediaPro and our wider partner network to transform the festival experience and raise the bar for fan engagement, ”  says CEO of Disguise, Fernando Küfer. “Events of this scale are what our Designer software and GX range were built for, and we’re excited to keep pushing these technologies further to deliver unforgettable powerhouse experiences for music fans again and again.”

Image credits: Christophe Viseux Photography